Stanislav Grof on Psychotropic Drugs
Psychoanalyst Stanislav Grof discusses his work in expanded awareness, which began as a medical student volunteering for a new drug called LSD.
Dr. Grof began his career in psychotherapy at the end of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. In his work exploring altered states of consciousness, he came to see how ludicrous the traditional medical understanding of these non-ordinary states of consciousness was. For example, in today’s lexicon of pathology, Buddha would be labeled schizophrenic, or at least borderline and St. John of the Cross a heredity degenerative.
Currently, Dr. Grof is Professor of Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in the Department of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness, and teaches at the Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, CA.